There are a lot of different reasons that you might be doing no contact after a breakup.

Maybe you want to get over your ex for good.

Maybe you want to get back together with your ex.

Maybe you want to get over your ex so that you can get back together with your ex.

There are a lot of reasons that you might use the no contact rule, so I’m going to go over it generally, so you can understand what your ex is thinking during no contact and you can use this information however you will towards whatever goals you may have for your own love life.

Additionally, there is also a wide range of psychological things that your ex might experience during no contact, right?

And a lot of this is going to be based off of the five emotional stages that your ex goes through in the process of getting back together.

With that understanding in mind, let’s go ahead and get into what your ex is thinking during no contact.

When you break up with your ex, there’s a wide range circumstances of what might have happened. It may have been a mutual breakup or there may have been lot of hurt feelings, anger, really bad experiences, and things like that.

This is true even if you don’t want to get back together with your ex and just want to get over your breakup.

I have named these stages the same names that they have for people who want to save their relationship.

After a breakup happens and after the damage is done, your ex will be in one of these stages and they’ll be experiencing different things based on how the breakup happened.

It’s important to know that if you go to no contact and your ex is very hard into the Wall of Reactance stage and they are emotionally resisting being in contact with you— initially when you go no contact, they will feel a sense of relief.

Your ex no longer has that lingering pressure to interact with you, respond when you text them, spend time with you or whatever it might be, right?

If they’re in Wall of Reactance or even Test Drive, your ex will initially experience a great degree of relief when you stop contacting them.

What a lot of people don’t realize when they get broken up with is while obviously they feel really terrible, their ex feels pretty bad too.

When you go through the process of dumping somebody, you tend to feel pretty lousy.

You feel upset with yourself.

It almost seems like you’re doing something wrong because you’re inflicting pain on somebody else.

Nobody wants to think of themselves as a bad person or the kind of person who goes and intentionally hurts somebody else. Most people that break up with somebody feel the sense of guilt that comes following a breakup.

So, if your ex is having a strong degree of resistance towards interacting with you, they’ll feel relief from that sense of guilt.

At least initially, you going no contact with your ex could actually be a very pleasurable experience for them.

If on the other hand, your ex is in one of the other, later stages of getting back together such as Riding the Dragon or definitely Crisis Point and New Beginnings, then they are going to experience a sense of loss.

This is where a lot of nostalgia and memories from the good times during your relationship come up.

During the later stages of getting back together, your exe’s emotional tone toward you is mostly positive so they will feel a great sense of loss when you go no contact. They will miss you and look back fondly on the time you had together.

As a layer on top of that, when you go into no contact with your ex after a breakup, there are a couple different ways you can do it.

You might officially announce to your ex that you are actually cutting contact by saying something like:

“Hey, I need some time for myself to really process this breakup. I hope you don’t take it personally but I’m going to be lying low and giving you some radio silence for a little while until I can actually interact with you in a reasonable sort of way.”

If that’s the case, your ex knows what’s going on and they can deal with it a little bit more appropriately.

If you go dark instantly, then they might be curious as to why you have suddenly stopped contacting them, especially if you were in damage control mode prior to cutting contact.

If you were in damage control mode, you might have been calling or texting your ex multiple times a day without them responding or reciprocating and suddenly you go completely silent.

They might initially have a sense of relief you know if they were in The Wall of Reactance Stage. They would say to themselves, “Whew! Finally, that’s over with.”

Then something starts to set in and your ex starts wondering:

“Why did they stop contacting me all of the sudden?”

“What happened?”

“Did my ex meet somebody new?”

“Is everything OK?”

“Did they get hit by a bus?”

There could be all kinds of things going through your exe’s mind and this can often cause people’s exes to want to check in on them.

Your ex might even go out of their way to contact you and ask, “Hey, is everything OK?”

Or… what’s more likely to happen especially now that we have social media and the internet is that your ex might start cyber stalking you.

Maybe they check up on your Facebook page to see if you are dating somebody new or what else you have going on in your life. They might snoop your social media profiles and so forth.

That’s not to say that this is necessarily a way for you to get them to come back to you because at this point in time, all that’s really happening is that your ex has a sense of curiosity about you.

Your exe’s curiosity about you in and of itself is not necessarily a good thing.

Say you’re watching a game show. It’s more like what do you want? What’s behind the door number one and behind door number two?

Behind door number one is a six-month around-the-world dream vacation. It’s valued at $100,000.

That’s obviously something that you would be curious about if that is the prize that you get.

Behind door number two is a toaster.

You might be curious to see what’s behind door number 2 during the show but it’s not something that you necessarily want in real life.

Curiosity in and of itself is not enough to pique your exe’s interest into being in a relationship with you again.

If you are interested in saving your relationship what has to happen is you have to create an emotional dynamic that feels good to your ex and shows them that they are not walking back into the same relationship that they left in the first place.

Just know that because of the sudden decrease or halt in all communications, no contact can trigger a sense of curiosity which might cause your ex to think about you, contact you and check up on you.

After your ex gets past the sense of relief, missing you, and curiosity— during the silence of no contact is when the overall tone of all emotional interactions you’ve shared adds up.

Say you and your ex were together for three years.

During the no contact period, the sum total of everything that happened in your exe’s emotional experience over those three years is going to start getting added up.

Maybe there was a time where you offered her your jacket when there was that downpour.

That’s plus one.

Or that time when you didn’t follow through and made a promise that you couldn’t back up and really hurt his feelings.

That might be like minus five.

It’s all based off of your ex’s own emotional experience of your relationship.

There’s no objective amount of points here– like this is worth plus two points, this is worth minus five points or whatever, right?

But it’s all going to get added up and leave your ex with an overall emotional impression of what your relationship was like.

If that emotional impression is mostly negative, your ex is going to feel very glad that you are not in contact with them and that the two of you are no longer together.

If the overall tone impression of this emotional calculus (so to speak) comes out as a net positive, your ex is going to start to miss the times that you had together.

This time apart is going to make them more open to the idea of interacting with you, having a conversation and possibly even cause them to miss you enough to make them reach out and contact you themselves.

Thus, your ex might be the one who breaks your no contact period.

This is basically an overview of what your ex is thinking during no contact.

About Clay Andrews

If you are an action-taker who wants to get your ex back, Clay and Mika will show you everything you need to know to have a deeper and more profound connection with your ex, so that you both can have a second shot at lasting love (even if your situation feels hopeless). Find out more here now.

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